Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

It's Not the Crime, It's the Cover-Up

By Alan
Caruba

I still
recall the long months of the Watergate scandal that began with a botched
break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, D.C. on June 17,
1972. It was directed by a group of presidential operatives dubbed the
“plumbers” inside the White House. No one died, but a number of the operatives,
including the Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to jail!

As always,
it is not the crime, but the cover-up that brought down the Nixon presidency. It
was the testimony of John Dean III, a top aide to Nixon, who revealed the
extent of the corruption that existed and Nixon’s complicity.

The
initial revelations and subsequent congressional investigations did not lead to
a swift application of the law. Indeed, it would not be until August 9, 1974
that Nixon would resign, the first and only President to do so.

Two years
would pass and, if one applies this to the Obama presidency, that means he has
some twenty-four months left in office, a period of time in which he can do a
lot of damage, assuming events play out as they did in the 1970s. Obama’s
conduct of the presidency is a stain on the office at this point and his
personal conduct an insult to Americans struggling to find work, pay their
mortgages, put their children through college, and maintain any faith in their
government.

At this
writing, there is no way to know what revelations will occur during Wednesday’s
congressional committee hearing on the events surrounding the Benghazi attack
that led to the assassination of a U.S. ambassador and the three security
personnel who gave their lives in the effort to save him.

What is
known is that neither the State Department led by then-Secretary of State
Clinton, nor the White House did anything to protect the Libyan embassy, consulate, and
ambassador prior to or during the attack. This is a serious dereliction of
duty, particularly by the Commander-in-Chief who retired to bed after being
informed of the attack and then flew off to a fundraising event the following
day.

Unlike
Watergate, four Americans died. That is very serious, but the White House has
devoted the months since September 11, 2012 to an effort to distract our
attention from that fact.

When the
White House press secretary, Jay Carney, can dismiss the attack as something
that happened “a long time ago” you get a very clear insight regarding either
his insipid stupidity or a deliberate effort to stonewall reporter’s questions,
or both. In testimony before Congress, Clinton may well have committed perjury.
At the very least, “What difference does it make?” displayed a level of
indifference that is appalling.

Most
certainly, with the exception of Fox News and a handful of others, the lap dog
journalists that cover the White House have done their best to avoid the
obvious. Indeed, was it not for the on-going investigative work of Bob Woodward
and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, the Watergate scandal might have
been swept under the rug.

On May 4
Roger Simon, a political columnist for Politico.com, reminded readers that, on
October 27. 2012, he asked, “If Barack Obama is reelected, will he face
impeachment over Benghazi—a yet more unpleasant and far more wrenching result
than to lose an election?”

“It could
happen—and in my estimation should happen—the way revelations are playing out
over the bloody terror attack that took four American lives and has led to
weeks of prevarication and obfuscation.” In Simon’s opinion, “Barack Obama is
bloody lucky he’s a Democrat, because if he were a Republican, he’d been in
deep trouble right now, close to the brink of extinction. Only his increasingly
pathetic loyal media clique can save him. It will be interesting to see if they
do so at the expense of their own reputations.”

If history
is any guide, those who will testify at the congressional committee hearing now
and subsequent ones to occur, will lay the blame at the door of the Oval
Office, the Department of State, and even Defense.

There is a lot of
malfeasance and misfeasance to go around. Recall that the President, Secretary
of State Clinton, and the Ambassador to the UN, were all complicit in spreading
the boldfaced lie that the attack was not orchestrated by al Qaeda—on the
anniversary of 9/11—but was the result of a video that was alleged to inflame
the anger of Islamic terrorists.

I doubt
that anyone in the CIA and other agencies of government wants to go to jail for
Barack Obama or Clinton.

We are, I
suspect, going to repeat a new version of the Watergate scandal and, if
Congress and the courts rise to the occasion, we may well have seen the last of
Barack Obama as President of the United States of America.

3 comments:

But the cover up needs to be reported in the MSM before it can gain tractin as anything more than just another "Fox News Right Wing Conspiracy." And at this point the MSM is hip deep in the cover-up themselves as they would have to admit their collusion and support in getting Obama re-elected.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.